Here is a collection of 25 great quotes about writing from writers.
[Gathered by Regina Kenney]
“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L’Engle
“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
― Franz Kafka
“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King
“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
― Mark Twain
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anaïs Nin
“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
“You can make anything by writing.”
― C.S. Lewis
“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
― Saul Bellow
“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
― Anton Chekhov
“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
― Robert Frost
“There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.”
― Frank Herbert
“Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it.
Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner
“Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.”
― Neil Gaiman
“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.”
― Mark Twain, The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain
“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.”
― Anne Frank
“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
― Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades
“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.”
― William Wordsworth
“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
― W. Somerset Maugham
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